Amortentia at Home
by diamonddaydream
Summary: 1-shot Dramione marriage love story set after their 2nd child's birth. Looking to revitalize her physical relationship with Draco after the babies, Hermione brews herself a love potion. Will he be able to tell, and how is it connected to that potions lesson in their 6th year at Hogwarts? Between my longer works "The Oblivious Ones" and "Always Something" or read alone just fine.


It had been years since Hermione had brewed anything this demanding, and never before had she attempted it with a not-quite-newborn baby strapped to her chest and a two-year-old boy at her feet.

Desperate times.

The children were her own, hers and Draco's. The baby, tiny Castora, had only just joined them. Her brother, Pollux, had yet to openly acknowledge the baby's existence, though she was always with him now - so fair she looked bald, smelling of sweet milk, and perfectly content as long as she was held against another human. Pollux sat at his mother's feet chattering as she brewed, his proto-conversation filling her thoughts with his as she hummed her replies to him.

To rush this potion would be dangerous so she willed herself to work slowly, in spite of the looming end of Castora's nap and the approach of the end of the workday, when Draco would return home from the research institute they'd founded together. She glanced at curtains flapping with a breeze through the open window overlooking the street. There could be no smell of the potion left in the flat by the time he came back, or he'd know.

Not that she knew what the smell of Armortentia would be for him. She hardly knew how it would smell for her anymore. The old smells, the ones she had embarrassed herself blurting aloud in Slughorn's advanced potions class in sixth year, well, it didn't make much sense for her to smell them anymore. Funny, she'd never asked Draco what he had smelled in the dungeon that day. Truthfully, she hardly remembered him being there. It made her want to cry, as so many things did these days. She blinked and stirred.

Amortentia, she could almost hear Slughorn fine-tuning her explanation of it, though it is the world's strongest love potion, does not produce love at all but intense infatuation and obsession. That was all she needed, nothing more than that. She already had love for Draco, great depths of it. It was stable and strong. They had cultivated it between their minds and hearts and only after that between their bodies, tackling the post-trauma of war together, finding her parents and uncharming their memories and then working together, weathering two pregnancies and childbirths.

None of it began as merely physical, though the physical had come to be vital to both of them. It had been the physical that had triggered Castora's labour, two weeks early. But since then, Hermione hadn't wanted to be touched. She was happy to admire her beautiful young husband with her eyes alone, like a sunset or a waterfall. Whenever he caught her staring and moved to touch her, she withdrew, apologizing, still too heavy with the touch of her children. Maybe there were only so many times she could stand to be touched in a day, and all of them were used up by the children before he could make it home in the evening.

She couldn't just let their physical relationship dwindle away. In her way, she missed her desire for him as much as he missed her. And so - Amortentia, here in a cauldron in her kitchen, its steam beginning to bend into spirals, its surface reflecting the afternoon sunlight with a full spectrum of pearly sheen.

Somehow, she would have to get Draco to be the one to serve it to her. If she administered the potion to herself - well, no one had ever been documented doing that before, and Hermione's marriage was no place for that kind of experimentation. What if she took it by her own hand and gave herself one of those - oh, what do the Muggles call them - narcissistic personality disorders? No, she would have to arrange things so he gave it to her without knowing. She could pour it into a milk jug and ask him to add it to her tea. The pearliness would be hidden in the milk, and if some of it accidentally ended up going to little Poll - well, he couldn't be much more obsessed with them than he already was so there'd be no harm in a little of that.

She didn't mean it, of course, and was beginning to laugh at herself for making excuses for love potioning her toddler when she heard the front door sweep open. Draco was home early. She gasped, but after all this time and work, she couldn't bring herself to simply vanish the potion and she kept stirring, reaching into her mind for her old knack for thinking up a story fast.

"Hermione?" he called from the front door. "Hermione, why do I smell Amortentia in my own kitchen?"

The smell had come on slowly, habituating her senses to it as she worked and she hardly noticed it. For her, the smells in the potion had always been subtle, and they still were: freshly mown grass, new parchment, and a musky damp smell like something nice that had got soaked but not ruined by rain - earth, or the wood of living trees, or even clean hair. After all this time, how could these smells be the same as they were when she was in school, lovesick for - someone else?

She answered Draco's question with a question of her own. "Amortentia? Who's to say what Amortentia smells like, darling? I'm only brewing something to help me recover from the baby," she said, truthfully enough. She lifted the cauldron and turned her back to him, screening the sight of the distinctive liquid as she poured it into an opaque jar and corked it closed.

He stepped into the kitchen, sniffing. "That's quite the coincidence then. It smells just like my Amortentia. It's freshly mown grass and new parchment - "

"Very funny, Draco," she said.

He frowned. "What is?"

"You."

"What'd you mean?"

She sighed, exasperated. "You're only saying you smell grass and parchment because you remember me making an ass of myself back in potions class saying the same things."

Draco stooped to lift Poll away from her feet, kissing his round, soft but sticky cheek. "Did you?"

"Yes, of course I did," she said, raising her voice so he could hear her over Poll chattering into his face. "Everyone heard me. You must have been standing right behind me as I said it. How could you not have heard?"

He set Poll down. "In sixth year, was it?" he said, sliding his hands into the sling to extract his delicate little daughter. She was still sleeping but so beautiful he kissed her anyway as she stretched her wee arms, her pink fists clenched. "I was a bit distracted sixth year, what with the threats to my life and the entire Malfoy line. Might not have committed all of your abundant expository in-class speeches to memory. Sorry, love."

"But," she stammered, "but why would you say your Amortentia smells like mine then? You don't mean to say you fancied Ronald Weasley that year too?"

He pounced. "Ah, so it is Amortentia I smell in here?"

She sighed again. "Yes. There, are you happy?"

He laughed, a little nervously. "Why ever did you make it? Who is it for? Not me, I hope. You certainly don't need it to convince me."

"No, it's not for you, it's for me. You need to administer it to me, so I can - get on with it."

"What a beautiful romantic speech, darling. I'm overcome."

"Oh, stop it. I didn't want to talk about this at all - Poll, Pollie, no…"

They fed Pollux his dinner and put him to bed before they tried to talk about the Amortentia again. Hermione had nursed little Cassie to sleep in their bed and joined Draco in the lounge, where he waited for her on a green leather sofa like the one in his mother's library. On her way in, she found the jar of freshly brewed Amortentia and brought it with her.

"Here," she said, extending it toward him. "Let me sip the jar from your hand. That should give you at least one full night of your old wife back."

He took the jar but set it aside on the table at his elbow, the cork undisturbed. "I loved my old wife. It's true. But I don't want her anymore." He restrained himself from reaching for her hand. He sat waiting, speaking. "I want my new wife. I want Cassie's mother. I've never been with her before, and I'm desperate to have her."

She smirked, rolling her eyes. "Then gag her with the bloody potion already."

He patted the seat beside himself on the sofa. "Sit down. Let's talk about Amortentia."

She hesitated.

"Come on, love, before one of the babies wakes up."

She sat, sighing once again. "About the smell of it," she began, "you aren't playing with me when you say it smells like grass and parchment, are you?"

He shook his head. "No, I'm not. Those are two very common and very benign smells though. Maybe they're like solvents, and everyone smells a little of them in Amortentia."

"No," she said. "Harry and Ron smelled mostly food and flowers and sports equipment. You don't get any flowers?"

"None at all," he said.

She cleared her throat. "What else then? There were other smells in it for me. I caught myself and stopped announcing them to the whole class before I said them out loud." She told him about the rained-on smell, lacing her fingers with his as she did. "That one makes sense now."

It did. They had fallen in love traveling together in a rainy country, to a coastal, woodsy Canadian town. And on the night they'd finally come together, they had both been drenched in a late summer rain, droplets still falling from the ends of his hair onto her skin.

He squeezed her hand. "That smell is there for me too. But in sixth year, I had another name for it. I first thought of that smell as mud."

She raised her eyebrows. "Mud? As in…"

"Yes, as in 'No, this cannot possibly mean Granger.' I knew Slughorn wasn't on my parents' side and figured he had slipped some of his politics into his love potion, trying to reverse our brainwashing by making people like you seem more - pleasant. I dismissed it as manipulation, brilliant but not genuine. I hadn't thought about it in years, but I guess I was wrong."

"You're joking."

He shrugged. "We don't have to remember it that way if we don't want to. It's our story to write. There are parts of our story I cannot abide. But I like this one, where, as sixteen-year-olds we smelled Amortentia the same way, for whatever reason. Let's work out the rest of it. Settle in. Write this mystery with me."

She acquiesced, leaning into his shoulder. "So why mown grass? I always thought that meant the Burrow."

"That's just because you come from the city. Mown grass is everywhere, not just at Weasley's place. Our manor is acres of cut grass. You know that."

"I know that now, but -"

"Think about it, Granger," he said. "We hardly met on the train the first time we went to school. Remember where we were the first time I really forced myself into your view?"

She squinted. "The flying lesson."

"Yes, outside on a grassy field."

She smiled. "It was the same in second year. The first time you called me mudblood. Outside, on the quidditch pitch, on the grass. But that certainly did not make me love you."

He smirked. "Right, and the smell of Amortentia isn't about love. It's about attraction."

"Which you negated with the force you used to repel me," she said, sliding one palm across his chest.

"Yes, likewise," he agreed as his arm curved cautiously around her waist. "This isn't a story about us being on the same side. It's one about us being drawn to each other in spite of whatever lines other people might have tried to draw around us."

"Fair enough," she said, "and as for parchment, mine was specifically new parchment. So that means going back to Hogwarts after a break, to be near - whoever I fancied - again."

Draco clucked his tongue. "Maybe not exactly. Not if you say 'new' parchment."

She sat up. "Right. The Weasleys didn't use new parchment. They erased their old writing and reused parchment over and over again."

"Of course they did. That's what most kids in school are expected to do. Using new parchment every time they wrote was only done by two kinds of students: fastidious ones who considered their own work too important and well-done to wipe away - "

"Like me," she nodded.

"And rich kids showing off being able to afford it."

"Like Harry!" she grinned.

"Like me, you daft thing." He leaned over her until she was lying on the sofa, his face hovering above hers. "I don't believe for a second you ever fancied Potter, so don't even try it."

She laughed at him as she fought back to sitting upright, beside him. "What would have happened," she mused, "if they had known? If we had sent our sixteen-year-old selves letters from the future, on new parchments of course, and told them to go to the quidditch pitch the next time it rained to meet their true loves?"

Draco frowned. "Honestly, I would have been too paranoid to go. Would have assumed it was a test or a trap and I would have fled and hidden."

"Same with me." She nodded. "Everything was too risky and cruel that year. But what if we were sad enough, lonely enough to take the chance anyway." She laid her hand against his face. "What if you were there, and I was there, out on the grass, each of us clutching a scrap of new parchment, like a last hope - my note written in your handwriting, yours written in mine. And we both stood on the wet, freshly cut lawn, puzzling over it, our heads bent close together." She rose to her knees on the sofa beside him, his face still in her hands. "And I smelled the last element of my Amortentia - the part I couldn't have possibly described until that moment - the scent of your skin."

She leaned toward him and pressed her mouth to his throat. His breath left him in a rush. He could see the scene in his mind as clearly as if they had lived it - both of them damp in their Hogwarts robes, turning toward each other famished for the comfort and love withheld from them. Her hand would have been in his hair, like it was now. His would have been hot enough for her to feel it on her back through her clothes, like it was now, as he held himself back from taking too much too quickly. He would have closed his eyes and tipped his head back before ducking toward her mouth to catch it with his own at last, inhaling the smell of her, not from a vial brewed in a dungeon this time, but from her warm, living skin and hair and breath.

In their London flat, he pulled Cassie's mother on top of himself on the sofa, the jar of Amortentia rattling on the table beside them, sealed shut.

**AN: If you liked this version of the Granger-Malfoys read how they got together in "The Oblivious Ones," more about them as young parents in "Slytherin Fairy Godmother," and about them as parents of teenagers in "Always Something." Thanks for reading! DDD**


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